Texts for Translation 2010:
  Jimmy Kelly

Chapter 10 : Victorian Times

In 2006, the National Trust considered renting out Thomas Hardy’s cottage to paying guests who wished to experience life in an 1840s cottage. It is apparently a distinctly olde-worlde building,with several small rooms, and to make it acceptable to the guests it will have battery-powered candles, water from a tap, not the well, and a flushing loo. Otherwise, food ,cooking, and entertainment will be a la I840s. No special training seems to be required. for this rather namby-pamby effort to experience the past. There have been several TV series which have recreated life as was during WWII and even late Victorian times. Interestingly, none has tried to sample city life in the 1840s, least of all as lived in Glasgow’s Saltmarket at that time.

I’ve always assumed this kind of programme planning is decided round a table by a committee. I assure you that even the vaguest possible description of what Saltmarket life was like would immediately bring the meeting to a halt, and within minutes, in a storm of accusations of deliberate vulgarity, diseased imagination, grand guignol, not to mention lawsuits for political incorrectness, sexual harassment, and breaches of mental Health and Safety . Even Channel 5 can never attempt it. As for Health and Safety, no attempt could be made to even start to build the sets, without the whole process being deemed illegal. And, of course, the charge of creating urban legends, even if Victorian social and industrial life is one of the best documented periods of British history.,

I shall spare you , however, the worst of this period in the Glasgow experience. If you want to know more, the ultimate treatment is ‘The Irish in Scotland 1798-1845’ and ‘The Irish in Modern Scotland’ by James Handley, much of which inevitably deals with Glasgow. Although don’t miss the Edinburgh bits. I shall also spare you any short history of the Industrial Revolution. Before history became a matter of building cardboard models of Braveheart’s but and ben, any schoolchild knew about steam, and railways, and new techniques and people flooding to the cities and the terrible conditions of Britain’s Industrial Revolution. But it has been pointed out by experts that all of the worst features of all of these could be found in Glasgow, plus shipbuilding, and plus the biggest plus of all, the Irish and the Highlanders.

Housing was obviously the main problem. Handley points out : ‘Glasgow in the nineteenth century was the most densely populated area, computed at 500 to the acre, in the United Kingdom. In one small rectangular area in the heart of the city bounded in the east by High Street, in the

west by Candleriggs, on the south by Trongate and on the north by Stirling Road, the population exceeded that of several Scottish counties.’

And if only 355 houses were built between 1831 and 1841, and the city gained 78,000 new Glaswegians, as was the case, where did they live? They simply built houses beside the original Glasgow buildings, or on top of them, or more houses on top of these and so on. One old family house with a big back yard in the Merchant City could find itself the home of hundreds. Making your home a lodging house also brought in money; one Glasgow woman rented out the space below the beds to children . Easy to please, i.e. homeless guests, were a temptation to overcrowding, although pigs and donkeys, the contemporary equivalents of budgies and hamsters, would no doubt always receive special treatment.

I remind you of the flushing loo provided for those roughing it in Thomas Hardy’s cottage, and I really have to mention the toilet arrangements. The disposal of ordure could have been awkward enough, but it was saleable, as fertiliser, and this called for its storage. One Chinese box of houses had three dungheaps, one in each courtyard. One group of six closes in Stockwell Street had eight, not counting the stairs, as an observer noted. If you think that was bad, look up Edinburgh, notoriously debonair for toilet arrangements. Gardy-loo, OK? One close there had ‘encrustations of filth, in some places six inches thick, in the forms of icicles and stalactites’. I’ll leave the subject there, only to add that it can give a new perspective to the many TV commercials which harp on the importance of a properly fragranced domestic atmosphere.

Inevitably disease followed, especially typhus and cholera. Space and income being at a premium in a lodging house, beds were often simply a portion of the floor, divided by piece of wood, kept in place by a stone or a brick. One example will be enough., from a lodging house in Saltmarket.

‘On a floor measuring fifteen feet by eleven feet
were huddled seven beds containing eight cases
of fever.The atmosphere was suffocating. Nine
corpses had already been taken away from the
room within a short period. No sooner were the
dead removed than their places were occupied
by other lodgers who were laid on the same
straw and infected bedclothes.’
And , of course, there was the apparently inevitable Glasgow touch:
‘Their lodging house keeper received food and
cordials from the hospital for her patients, but
she had sold the goods, and spent the money
on drink.’

The dangers to health and safety of the new industrial processes tended to affect mostly males, obviously enough, and there are plenty of examples. But females could be equally at risk.Bleach and dye works might seem innocuous enough, but there was one aspect of them which only Highland and Irish females were considered tough enough to handle, however briefly. There were two types of drying stove involved. In one, women worked at temperatures of between 70 and 130 Fahrenheit.Bad enough, but in the other, material was ‘waved’ at temperatures of between 70 and 100 degrees, and then was taken to be ‘waved’ again in a cold room. Statistics for death by pneumonia are unavailable, deliberately or not.

Dickens , Kingsley and Lord Shaftesbury did their bit to combat the excesses of child labour. But they did not reach Glasgow, where were found ‘young girls of ten, eleven and twelve years of age who work occasionally twenty hours out of the twenty four in a temperature of about 110 degrees.’ Francis Conery, aged nine, worked a 12 hour day in total darkness in a local coal mine.And at this time there coal mines underneath most of Glasgow,the miners’ cottages now expensive properties in Knightswood.

‘ a little boy named John. The boy was very ill-
clad,having only a pair of trousers and a shirt on, and
he had no jacket or shoes. The day was very cold and
wet , and the boy, who did not appear to exceed five
or six years of age, was very weakly. Forty two vents
had to be cleared out and the boy went up one and
another until he had cleared out thirty seven of the
vents. He died in the thirty- eighth vent in a tenement
near the Arkhouse Toll bar in Paisley Road. Hughes
was swearing at the boy and threatening him.’

Anyway, if drinking a toast to anyone does any good apart from showing them that they are not completely forgotten, even if their surname has not survived, next time you have a good malt whisky, drink one to a little boy named John, cold and weakly, who died clearing out the thirty eighth vent in a tenement near the Arkhouse Toll bar in Paisley Road, being sworn at and threatened by Francis Hughes, whose name survives only in the Lord Advocate’s Department records dealing with his punishment. And in Hell.

The obvious question is why people would flock to live in this kind of environment.From the Irish point of view, if one lived in the midlands, one answer is potatoes, and the unbelievably stressful look out in the morning to see if the crop was green and nutritious, or brown and deadly. If the potatoes came up healthy, you lived ; if they did not, you died. If you lived on the coast, there were other alternatives. In the Orkneys, according to a Report of Her Majesty’s Commissioner as late as 1885, shellfish was obviously available there if you were unlucky. Otherwise,’…breakfast was porridge and milk, or dry porridge if the cow was dry…His dinner was fish, if possible..sometimes diversified with nettle broth, the nettles being boiled with a little meal…..bread was made from the seeds of mild mustard.’ So you could have potatoes, or starve, if it was bad year, or dine on mustard bread and shellfish, in other words on a morning roll of whelks. Or even limpets. Inevitably, the Celtic fringe looked elsewhere. Especially to the Saltmarket of Glasgow.

‘Down the long vista towards the river and
westward towards Stockwell, a blaze of light is
reflected from street lamps, open doors and the
upper storey casements of numerous
tenements,while a canopy of smoke and darkness
seemed suspended in middle air above. Both foot
pavements are crowded with active and lazy
pedestrians, elbowing and boring and pushing
their way through knots of idle loungers ,
congregated about the entrance of dark and dismal
closes and wynds, which stretch away backward
nobody knows where.
Crowds are also flowing and surging like
troubled waters up and down the centre of the
street, and every now and then they are divided or
pushed aside by cabs, fish- barrows, hurleys and
donkey carts laden with coals. Along the outside of
the pavement huxters with stalls and without them,
are busy roaring and gesticulating and selling their
fish, oranges, cheese,handkerchiefs, notepaper,
braces and Brummagem razors.
As we pass along the street, we observe the
oyster shops blazing with gas and the sills of the
open windows are heaped up with barrow-loads of
empty shells.The eating shops or tripe houses as
they are commonly called, are, however, deserving
of something more than a passing notice..with their
tempting sights of riotous living, their familiar
sounds of jingling, spoons, knives ,forks and
crockery, and their indescribable and overpowering
smells….in the centre of the window sill we
observe a large tray heaped up with tripe..This
centre dish is flanked left and right with plates of
cow-heel, pigs feet,sheeps trotters, grey puddings
and black puddings,full to the bursting point and
doubled up like horse collars.’

The theatre and the music hall are areas of study which are too specialised to be gone into here, in particular the Glasgow custom of expiating guilt for visiting the theatre by burning it down, a very frequent occurrence. The excesses of the music hall are also far too interesting to rush through , but one must note a distinction between Glasgow audiences and those elsewhere in Britain. Shakespeare’s audience was the first to notice the value of the orange as a means of direct dramatic criticism, especially the over-ripe orange .The arrival of the tomato allowed it to play its part,along with a wide range of vegetable material, in various states of decomposition.

Glasgow audiences, naturally, did not eschew these,but had a particular fondness for whelk shells. While it was difficult to gain the same range with these as with, say, half a turnip, the effort was worth while, and the target was only, after all, the floor of the stage itself. Something of a covert weapon, because difficult to see, but solidly spherical, it was capable, when inadvertently trod on, of catapulting the performer into as nice a spectacular somersault as ever made the evening for an audience.

A carnival on Glagow Green is once again today a feature of the Fair Fortnight, but is rather different from the mid-nineteenth century version. One of the best descriptions of it is by a local minister.He says he ‘exulted in the final annihilation of the Shows at Glasgow Fair’, understandably perhaps :

‘I have seen a human Brute skin with his teeth 20
rats in so many minutes- until the Police were
called to interfere, but reluctantly.Frequently poor
Creatures in the last stage of Consumption were
upon hire , and were exhibited 150 times a day, for
weeks, as ‘Living Skeletons’.’

The Fair then was still a fair, i.e. a place where horses and farm animals were sold. Naturally, as a sophisticated Glaswegian, he doesn’t think much of the accompanying visitors to the big city, commenting on the ‘unsophisticated merry-making of whisky-inspired ploughmen’ and ‘dolts who thronged in from the mining districts and hamlets in the neighbourhood.’to see ‘Giants and Giantesses, Fat Boys and still fatter Girls, Learned Pigs and Unlettered Dwarfs.’

Merrymaking women and children are not forgotten, among the former being ‘unkempt hizzies’ and ‘pimple-skinned jades’, while he also mentions ‘roundabouts to sicken children, at the small cost of a halfpenny’ .He was obviously not a fan of the Shows, an expression which interestingly still survives in Glasgow speech for any kind of carnival, but is happy to blame the Corporation for hiring out the groiund, and causing ‘woeful scenes of Drunkenness, Immorality, Thefts , fights and general mischief’.

Theological crime in the city’s early history, as we have seen, was dealt with very competently. Petty crime was dealt with quite severely , and with little or no attention to political correctness and the rights of the malefactor. Persistent theft got you a nail hammered through your earlobe into a tree or wall. You could get it out any way you liked, but inevitably you would always be identifiable, from some yards away, as a thief. This was known as a ‘luggie’. Capital punishment was commonplace in certain eras. As I’ve said,when an electrical junction box was being located at Gallowhill, near Milngavie, 54 human skulls were found. And there was none of this nonsense about 8 a.m. executions behind prison walls, and a notice put up on the door.

As late as 8th March 1784, May Bailey was the last person to be burned at the stake in Britain, in London, for Petty Treason, or husband murder. But public hanging was still going strong, if not as strongly as one might have expected in Glasgow, given the partial breakdown of society. Between 1814 and 1865, 111 people were executed outside the present High Court at the foot of the Saltmarket. After 1831, 16 of these were for murder,1 for a bank robbery, 2 for aggravated robbery and assault, or mugging, and one for throwing vitriol. Some will say, given the conditions, that capital punishment worked; others will say that the minuscule police force, with no technological support, simply made sure that the ones they caught were dealt with.

The most spectacular execution was that of James Wilson, a weaver from Strathaven , charged with treason after a radical rising, having marched with an old flag and a rusty sword with a hole through the blade. Treason being the charge, he was actually condemned to hanging, drawing and quartering, but the hostile crowd, already barely controlled by a heavy military presence, would not have tolerated this. So he was hanged, and then beheaded, complete with the traditional executioner’s routine of holding up his head, and shouting ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ Since areas of Glasgow had been surveyed for a railway line not long before this, there could well have been the surreal, but somehow very Glaswegian sound effect, of the head thumping the bottom of the basket to the accompaniment of a train whistle somewhere.

In Victorian times, floggings were a popular public spectacle , but the most popular of all was still hanging.This took place outside the High Court building at Glasgow Green, giving rise to the old Glasgow insult ‘You’ll die facing the Monument.’ Glaswegians were anxious for justice to be done, but even more anxious to see it being done. A box was once put in front of the trap-door, but this was highly unpopular .Handley quotes page 80 of ‘Nestor’s ‘Rambling Recollections of Old Glasgow’ on this box, ‘which was at one time so constructed that the bodies of the culprits dropped down, and were hidden all but their heads covered with white caps. Letters of remonstrance appeared in the newspapers, and in consequence the outer wall of the box was cut and lowered so that the struggles of the victims might be better seen.’

The last woman to be publicly executed in Glasgow was Helen Blackwood, on August 11th 1853. She and her partner invited two seamen up for a drink, and drugged them with whisky mixed with snuff. Even this did not take out one of the seamen completely, so they struck him over the head with an earthenware vessel, and threw him out of a three storey window to silence him. All horrifyingly sordid enough, but , bizarrely, they had forgotten the presence of two children in the bed recess, who were the witnesses for the prosecution. We can only imagine the effect all this had on them. Helen Blackwood’s final struggles ‘were very severe and protracted, as indicated by the convulsive motion of the chest, the tremors of the body and the uplift of the knees’, but only for about 5 minutes.

Last of all to be publicly executed was Dr Edward William Pritchard, the Human Crocodile, who would go down in criminal history for having had the coffin unscrewed so that he could kiss one more time the wife whom he had murdered in agony by slow poisoning. He also murdered his mother in law. ’Gallus’ i.e. ‘over the top’, ‘full of bravado’, comes from the last privilege given to the condemned on the gallows, i.e. to speak his or her mind. ‘MacPherson’s Rant’ is a famous example. This was a frisson bonus for the crowd, since the speaker was guaranteed to be called to judgement within the next few minutes. Dr Pritchard was gallus enough to remark to the Governor of Duke Street Prison towards the end of June that it was ‘Magnificent weather, glorious weather for the strawberries.’ But on Friday morning July 28th 1865, the weather was dull and lowering, and he was a little more low key.

The crowd was estimated at 80,000 plus by the ‘Glasgow Herald’. The reporter seemed to be new to Saltmarket life, and was taken aback by the attitude of the locals on the eve of the execution: ‘ a new feature in their nightly lives which it behoved them to enjoy. They hurried hither and thither, both men and women, shouting at each other, laughing loudly at ribald jests, and making references in the most offensive terms to the forthcoming event.’

Dr Pritchard’s interest in fruit growing conditions had waned, in a classic case of suddenly realising what was going to happen. ‘His handsome features wore an aspect of marble paleness. His eye was full and clear, and steadily directed to the sky. The step was long and firm. The attitude of the bare head, with the long beard projecting to the front and the hair flowing behind was striking and sadly dramatic.’

Again, as in the case of Matthew Clydesdale, the ultimately incalculable emotional response of Glaswegians to life was in evidence:

There is a final touch which gives Dr Pritchard yet another kind of resonance in the long, complex and bizarre psychohistory of the city . Many years after his execution, his skeleton was discovered in the course of plumbing work. As Jack House says, ‘By some chemical freak, the patent leather boots which he wore to the scaffold were still in a perfectly preserved state. Somebody took these boots and sold them to an unsuspecting member of the public.’ One says would this happen anywhere else? One says could this happen anywhere else ?

It’s good to know when one has met one’s match, and I knew I had met mine when I read the books by John Burrowes and James Handley on life in nineteenth century Glasgow. So much so, that I have no intention of attempting to match them. If you want to know what the experience of nineteenth century life was like, read them. Handley mined the Mitchell Library’s incredible social documentation resources, before photocopiers and armed only with a fountain pen and sheets of paper .He retrieved , against a background of familiar streets we still walk on, the unbelievable details of the spectacular disintegration of not just civilisation in Glasgow, but , as future sociologists will notice, a paradigm of how quickly civilisation in general can disappear.

It wasn’t just that civilisation disappeared, but that the agrarian tensions of Ulster had to be reaffirmed as well. And with Saturday night specials, as a certain type of revolver, with kamikaze capability, is called in the U.S. Burrowes highlights a sectarian battle in Partick to which Henry Fonda and Victor Mature, or Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas later would have tipped their Stetsons as veterans of the O.K. Corral.

Maintaining this kind of religious tension I have mentioned every day was impossible in a tenement building, even if only because of the price of ammunition. The hardships of everyday life gave the warring elements much more in common than their religion. But the tension was there, as it still is. The Famine, as lethal as several nuclear bombs, left a bigotry fall-out in Scottish life, a divided city. It would be showing itself already in more subtle forms than small-arms fire in the 1800s, as it would continue to do in the city at every level, from golf clubs upwards to the serious business of living. Glasgow, the original stratum from the eighteenth century little town, was an essentially Protestant community going into the 1800s. It became a divided city, and is, tragically, still so. But it never seems to make any sense. In April 2006, William Wallace was voted by poll as the most famous Scotsman. How a man who was essentially a Papist adventurer who has reached this position may well be one of Scotland’s greatest mysteries. Like the Declaration of Arbroath, which was an appeal to a Pope to interfere in Scotland’s internal affairs. My advice to New Glaswegians is not to worry about it. I stopped long ago.

Glasgow settled down. Housing improved. Many buildings had toilets, admittedly communal, but consider the alternatives. If you wanted water, you didn’t have to queue at a pump with a pail at the corner of the street for it. It was actually piped into homes! There was plenty of work, most of the time. Queen Victoria was on the throne. Britain ruled the waves. A lot of the atlas was red. Somebody had invented well-fired morning rolls. Sir Thomas Lipton had provided ham and eggs for all. You could take a train to your work. Places like Rothesay and Largs provided an annual holiday target to aim for, like Bali or Pitcairn Island or Kerguelen or who knows where nowadays.

Life, in the Glasgow experience of it, looked good. Amused tolerance may well have been extended to the antics of Ulster immigrants with long memories. But, as always happens, somebody decided to make money out of these, a human flaw extending at least as far back as Judas Iscariot. And Celtic and Rangers appeared. A homely metaphor from backcourt days is ‘the ball is burst’, indicating the abrupt and unexpected termination of an otherwise enjoyable experience. It was burst. And it is still burst.

There are still two great areas of social exploration which have hardly been touched, if you’ve got time. Whatever the neomarxist community may trumpet, money is actually quite important. These people had none. Their currency was old clothes. That’s it. Old clothes. I leave it to somebody else to tell us, and there’s plenty of documentation about what it was like to live in a district like the Saltmarket with inconceivable numbers of people in an unbelievably small area and to negotiate for the necessities of everyday life using old clothes.

The other great untouched area is Glasgow’s relationship with maritime life. As a world seaport, Glasgow’s interface with the world was its sailors, most of whom served their trade before the mast. Under the city’s nineteenth century life, like a geological stratum, was the lifestyle of the constant reappearance, as their ships landed, of some very hard characters indeed, as they had to be. The well publicised life style of the Barbary Coast has given San Francisco’s maritime history an extra dimension. Glasgow’s is well enough covered in the files of ‘The Glasgow Herald’, as is, in hundreds of court cases, its old clothes currency, but it will take new technology , or a lifetime spent in the Mitchell Library, to make both these essential features of the Glasgow experience readily available. They will be worth reading about.

Anyway, at this point I leave the narration of the Glasgow Experience, as the nineteenth century moves into the twentieth century, to the professional historians and to the novelists. After its recent refurbishment, the Mitchell Library is even more magnificent than ever, and its assistants just as helpful. You’ll find there every Glasgow book you’ll ever want to look for. If your particular interest is Glasgow fiction, the publications of Moira Burgess on this subject are absolutely the last word, and beautifully written as well.

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